My cousin Robert and his wife Virginia...their son Robert Lee Morris - or "Lee" - now lives in Charleston. His mother told me months ago he is a photographer, and I remembered him when Dunes Properties recently required some fresh stuff.
The title of this post is a slightly paraphrased dictum, #4 of his "7 notions of innovation," from Kodak's Antonio M. Perez, as quoted in BusinessWeek's IN special section (here).
On Wednesday next week I'm sitting down with my own team at BURRIS and talking again about what defines us, what separates us from others who say they do what we do, and what we in fact enjoy about doing it in the first place.
At this time I believe we have a championship team, and it's probably our greatest strength. Six individuals, each with his or her own unique personality and skill set, but all enjoying what we do, (most often) for whom we do it, and - at least I believe it - getting along quite well as a team.
What we need now, what we seem to always need, are more customers to replace the ones whose projects we just completed. We have to keep selling, the key to selling what we do is being able to define it.
So that's our meeting next week. Wish us luck.
Reading a piece about J Allard of Microsoft in BusinessWeek recently, I came across this: "Brian Valentine, then a [Microsoft] networking manager, asked Allard what he'd want his epitaph to read if he died tomorrow. There was little hesitation: 'Go big or go home.'"
How would you answer?
I recall Johnny Carson's hilarious, "We'll be right back." And here's an entire (hobbyist) web site for humorous epitaphs, found by simply googling "epitaphs."
I don't know about mine, but I'll work on it.
Can't wait.
Here's a New York Times review of the show. And here's the official web site.
If you want to visit any of my earlier attempts to make sense of my worlds, here's a list of previous blogs I've written:
• "Burris Blog" - Where I could write about almost anything. At first I did this on Blogspot; then I moved to Apple's iWeb, where I kept up with three different blogs. Here's the Burris Blog portion of that.
• "Golfology" - So much of my company's work comes from golf companies, whether in the travel, real estate, equipment or even the media part of the business. So I used to write quite a bit about what I saw and felt about the golf business. The first version is here; you'll find part 2 of "Golfology" here; then with Eric Gordon's help, we expanded "Golfology" to a Burris site. That version is here.
• "Golfography" - Damn, as I write this post, I'm amazed that I kept this multi-layered blogging identity going for so long. "Golfography" was where I wrote about where and with whom I played golf. The first version was on Blogspot, and it's here. Then I moved it to my iWeb compilation of blogs. You'll find the more recent posts under "Golfography" here.
• And believe it or not, for about a year I tried to post a "Sunday Blog" to family and close friends. There's nothing especially sensitive or personal here, but its audience was certainly limited.
And none of my audiences was very responsive.
Whew, it makes me tired to think how much I used to try to keep up with. So now I "blog" for myself, using this Vox blog as a way of working out what I'm thinking about.
From today's (online) NY Times: A very interesting piece by John Markoff.
I quote the crux of the article:
"Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.
"The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
"In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”
"Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.
"How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web."
At least, that's what I tell a lot of people. It's one of the reasons I think I'll live here for the rest of my life.
So I'm away from my world class city, visiting the city I used to live in - in Guilford County, NC - Greensboro and High Point - and I'm in a restaurant, eating a quiet dinner, thumbing through Conde Nast Traveler's (November 2006) Top 100 issue.
Number five among the top 10 U.S. cities, Charleston, right after (in order) San Francisco, Santa Fe, New York and Chicago. Ahead of Carmel, Honolulu, Aspen, Seattle, and Sedona.
Number two among North America's Islands, there sits Kiawah, just to the south of Charleston. It's on the list just below Vancouver Island, and ahead of Nantucket (3), the San Juan Islands (4), Mount Desert Island (5), Cape Breton (6) and Martha's Vineyard (7). [By the way, my favorite island of all, Sanibel, is number 10.]
I couldn't have predicted what I found next, largely because I typically don't stay in hotels in Charleston, but there was the Wentworth Mansion in Charleston (6) the John Rutledge House Inn (26) and Charleston Place (51) in the (almost) Top 50 Mainland U.S. Hotels.
Imagine if the poll of readers had included restaurants.
Here are two "home" shots, one from 16 Seagrass on the Isle of Palms,
